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Our first Shore Poets event of the season! We hope you had a nice summer. At least two of the Shore Poets went to Greece, and one to Latvia.

Before we get started, here are a few brief housekeeping announcements:

1) we have a new mailing list, and if you haven’t signed up yet, here’s your chance: just click right here and fill in the few bits of information. This is likely only going to be for event notifications.

2) we have a new email address; the old one will not forward anything to the new one, though there should be an auto-reply. Apologies to anyone who emailed us and waited for a reply over the summer! That new address (take out spaces on either side of the @) is: shorepoetsedinburgh @ gmail.com

Pamela Besant is one of Orkney’s best known writers. She is originally from Glasgow but has lived and worked in Orkney for many years. She is a poet, freelance writer and editor. In 2007 she was awarded the first George Mackay Brown Writing Fellowship in Orkney, and later became chair of the organisation, which runs the Orkney Book Festival. Although she writes mainly poetry (Running with a Snow Leopard, Two Ravens Press, 2008, and Orkney: A Celebration of Light and Landscape, with photographer Iain Sarjeant, 2010), she also writes non-fiction and plays.

NEW POET: DOMINIC HALE

Dominic Hale was born in 1993 in Blackpool, Lancashire. As a teenager he won the Foyle Young Poets Award in 2009 and 2010, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Edinburgh Review, Clinic, the Morning Star, the Quietus, the Literateur, and Datableed. This month he began a doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, researching the earlier poetry of William Wordsworth and tracing its influence on English poets of the twentieth century.

SHORE POET: DIANA HENDRY

Newly-announced: Honorary Shore Poet Diana Hendry will be reading for us! Primarily a poet, Diana also writes short stories and is the author of many children’s books. She’s worked as a journalist, English teacher and a tutor at the University of Bristol, University of the West of England and the Open University. She has tutored many creative writing courses for the Arvon Foundation and for a year was writer-in-residence at Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary.

MUSICIANS: MIRKA

Shetland band Mirka, formed in 2011, are Danny Garrick (fiddle), Karis Garrick (piano), and Loris MacDonald (accordion). They are, individually, successful award winning students, firm fixtures on the Shetland music scene, and seasoned music travellers outwith Shetland too. Danny is a winner of the prized ‘Shetland Traditional Young Fiddler of the Year’ award.

Mirka’s music contains a whole host of mainly up-tempo,‘go-for-it’ tunes that you can simply listen to and enjoy in their own right, or, alternatively, dance yourselves’ into a ‘soolp of sweat’ to – as the old Shetland saying goes.

WILDCARD SPOT AND THE LEMON CAKE RAFFLE

The lemon cake raffle provides us with much-needed funds, so we very much appreciate your support. And it is a most excellent lemon cake. (Occasionally, we also have poetry books in the raffle, and are very grateful to the donors thereof.)

We should have a wildcard spot this month. Please mention to the person selling tickets that you’d like to put your name in the hat (ideally we will ask you, but sometimes we forget to ask and then we feel sad once we remember our omission). Bring a poem to read in case you’re chosen! You’ll have three minutes (this includes any preamble or introduction – it’s a good idea to time yourself in advance to make sure you’re within the time limits).